Lucy Keer

Another traditional virtue of logic is truth preservation (true premises => true conclusions); but there are nearly no absolute truths in the eggplant-sized world, and deduction does not preserve mostly-truth. So that’s not the answer outside applications in math and CS.pic.twitter.com/JZBRjPqrUH

@cdutilhnovaes’s book [quote below], and the others I’ll cite in this , treat logic as a culturally-evolved technology for particular sorts of reasoning. It’s something we do, not something we have or are. It’s also not something that lives in the Platonic Form Realm.pic.twitter.com/o4kxqx5KxN

Mostly we do formal reasoning on paper, or a blackboard or whiteboard. Some bits are best done in the shower, but most of it critically depends on these external material technologies. Richard Feynman got this:pic.twitter.com/zAFeMumKm0

Rationalism holds that rationality works by abstracting a concrete problem into an immaterial formal realm. This is a weird flex, inasmuch as modern rationalists are usually passionately committed to materialism. Can we do formal logic without spooks? Yes we can!pic.twitter.com/nOa4A8fFGZ

Taking formal reasoning as typically a publicly observable, material activity exorcizes the banshees. But, there’s something right about the “abstraction” idea. How and when and why does this work? [Eggplant text here and in last, not @cdutilhnovaes]pic.twitter.com/gXxLc31Bme

There’s also something partly right about the “informal reasoning messes up formal” idea, as shown by the Cognitive Reflection Test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reflection_test …pic.twitter.com/ef2sCzzgO3